Kars 4 Kids, the New Jersey non-profit that seeks to get people to donate their cars and get a tax deduction, has been banned from running its earthworm jingle-laced ads in California. An Orange County judge has found the ads misleading.
As someone who was plagued with being unable to get the repetitive jingle out of my mind for years, this has been of special interest to me. On the ruling:
Kars4Kids, the charity known for its repetitive jingle that sticks like glue in a listener’s brain, must stop broadcasting its ads in California, a judge ruled.
Judge Gassia Apkarian of the Superior Court of California, in Orange County, found that Kars4Kids’s ads violated the state’s laws against false advertising and unfair competition.
For years, the charity has broadcast TV and radio ads featuring children singing a jingle with the organization’s phone number and urging listeners to “donate your car today.”
But evidence presented at a civil trial showed that “children, especially needy or underprivileged children,” were not the exclusive recipients of the proceeds of the donated cars, Judge Apkarian wrote in her decision on May 8.
Instead, Kars4Kids primarily funds a New Jersey-based Jewish organization, Oorah, which provides programs, including an adult matchmaking service, trips to Israel for teens and summer camps in New York, the judge wrote. The only program in California that Kars4Kids sponsored was a promotional giveaway of Kars4Kids-branded backpacks, she found.
Judge Apkarian said that Kars4Kids had 30 days to stop broadcasting its ads in California.
If Kars4Kids resumes advertising, she wrote, its ads must contain “an express, audible disclosure of its religious affiliation and the geographic location of its primary beneficiaries and the age of the beneficiaries, specifying whether they aim for children or families, or both.”
Kars4Kids, a nonprofit based in Lakewood, N.J., said it planned to seek a stay of the ruling and would seek to have it reversed on appeal.
“We believe this decision is deeply flawed, ignores the facts and misapplies the law,” the organization said in a statement. “It’s well known that we are a Jewish organization and our website makes it abundantly clear.”
Kars4Kids added that it helps “thousands of kids with youth development, mentoring and educational programs, including hundreds in the state of California, contrary to the judge’s complete mischaracterization of our work and of the testimony at trial.”
If you’ve been living on Mars and didn’t hear the jingle, Dental Floss published an article about it.:
It can happen suddenly and without warning. Driving in your vehicle, a commercial break comes on. In addition to the standard pleas to use a specific laundry detergent or contemplate debt consolidation, the voice of a preadolescent, out-of-tune child materializes. Your grip on the steering wheel gets tighter. The child begins to warble:
1-877-Kars-4-Kids, K-A-R-S Kars for Kids, 1-EIGHT-SEVEN-SEVEN-Kars-4-Kids, Donate Your Car Today …
An adult breaks in to repeat the lyrics. The two begin to sing in unison:In roughly a minute, it’s over. You go on with your day. But the song’s repetitive melody sticks to your brain like sap. You hear it when preparing dinner. While brushing your teeth. As you put your head on the pillow. When it’s finally worked its way out of your brain and you’ve started to forget, it reappears.
The song is engineered to be obnoxious. And its producers wouldn’t have it any other way.
Since 1999, an untold number of Americans have found themselves reduced to mewling heaps of distress following exposure to the Kars4Kids jingle. The 501(c) nonprofit organization based in Lakewood, New Jersey, spends up to $17 million annually making sure this earwig of a commercial is played across the country. While the purpose is not expressly to annoy you, the fact that the song is irritating is what makes it memorable. And successful. And more than a little controversial.
Kars4Kids began in 1995 as a way to capitalize on the trend of automotive owners donating their unwanted cars in exchange for a tax deduction. Owners who donate their vehicles are able to get an IRS write-off—though typically for only a percentage of the current value—if they declare it a charitable donation. Kars4Kids arranges for the vehicle to be towed away and sold at auction, with proceeds going to afterschool and summer programs for students.
According to the organization, business was slow until one of their volunteers had an idea to craft a commercial song. The melody was purchased from a singer and songwriter named Country Yossi, and Kars4Kids enlisted a child to perform it at an in-house recording session. It debuted in the New York market in 1999, and spread like the plague to the West Coast by 2005 and nationally by 2007.
Aside from Yossi, however, the company has repeatedly declined to identify anyone else involved with creating the song. The reason? Death threats. The tune has apparently enraged people to the point of contemplating murder. Speaking to SanFranciscoGate.com in 2016, music cognition expert Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis said that the combination of repetitive structure and the overly simplistic message was engineered to grate the listener’s nerves.
It certainly grated on my nerves. I listen to a lot of radio while traveling and couldn’t brain-delete the tune for years. I’d hum it all day and catch myself. I’d go on long walks and runs fruitlessly hoping to expunge it. So in 2020 I decided to do a video in my non-writing incarnation as a ventriloquist about how no matter what I did I couldn’t exorcise the demon melody.
Here it is. I almost deleted this from my social media due to this story, some technical flaws etc. But here it is. I do all voices. Watch it till the very end.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, writes a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.